It's like family, only weirder...

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My wife and I like to think strategically about our future. Planning and foresight can save you a lot of grief and work in earnest.

In the event that we should become multi-millionaires in the future, we want to make sure we know what we’re going to do with the money. The following is an ongoing list of major things on our list:

Establish a Commune

And by commune, you have to understand my interpretation of the word. The usual ideas just don’t cut it – my idea of a modern commune is little more than a community of friends living in close proximity, each generally having some arcane talent. Other than that, everybody maintains their own job. The added benefit is that you have a community of actual friends in close proximity to help with things. Think about some of these nicer neighborhoods going up that include parks and community facilities like a club house or picnic area. That’s where the millions of dollars come in – someone has to pony up the money to put it together.

Establish an Olde World Arts and Crafts Guild

Look into America’s early years after the Declaration of Independence. As was popular in Europe, guilds popped up all over the place. Funny thing was, they never seemed to last. The guilds cranked out some epic-level work, but rarely made the profit needed to keep the their doors open. The Industrial Revolution was what put them out completely. Mechanized art, while not for the purists, was the way of the future and a clear winner in the end. Revival after revival, it was only when the the passion was washed out by insufficient funds that the guilds closed their doors. An arts and crafts guild would work today, but only if I could poor money into it endlessly.

Create an Elderly Care Facility that Cares

Most elderly care facilities – the ones that the average senior citizen could afford – are clever facades on the same old song and dance. There are too many horror stories to count as you look across the gamut and research their “customer appreciation.” A big reason for this is funding. The hired help is majority volunteer, public service workers, or minimum wage. When you’re not paying well, it’s hard to attract good help, but that’s just what you need.

My wife is the one with real passion for this one. She would love to pour many into a retirement home that is treated more like a spa than assisted living. It would have to be a non-profit venture with backing. The key is to rally support within the area communities, government, and of course, mad money.

Build the Lake Lanier Boardwalk District

How cool would it be to have a boardwalk district on Lake Lanier? I envision long wooden decking, boat slips, a beach, and fantastic night life and retail shopping. There should be bars with karaoke, an outdoor stage, a gallery, and much more. Normally, this kind of thing wouldn’t need so much money to keep it up, but I think I’d have to pay off the Corps. of Engineers a hefty sum to allow it!

Create a Seafood/Freshwater Fish Restaurant on the Lake

Along with that whole boardwalk idea, you have to have some big foundations. I purpose a fish restaurant out on the water. It would be awesome to have its center piece being a large circle of the lake with underwater lights and sub-level glass for viewing. Above that, have two to three stories encircling the “aquarium” for diners to look down upon. There is some real opportunity to make a case for the environmental concerns surrounding the lake in a venue like this.

Build an Irish Pub

Another permanent resident of the boardwalk should be a good old-fashioned Irish pub. If you know of McGuire’s in Pensacola, then your thinking along the same lines. Good food (or bad, but traditional!) and drinks. These relics of America’s past have always been places of fun and festivity.

I got a Christmas card from the nice folks at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) – the Climate Witness division. You may recall the article I wrote for them concerning the pitiful state of Lake Lanier (speaking of which, the scientific review of my story is now available). The card reminded me of the potential relevance of our recent confusing weather. Only one week before winter and the northeastern region of Georgia was coming in at highs of 70°F. Today marks the first official day of winter, but it actually arrived in a forced gust of cold wind yesterday. We went from muggy days in the high 60’s to the sudden shock of sub-freezing temperatures Sundays afternoon. By Monday morning, we were in the low 20’s and all remaining signs of water in the streets had frozen solid. There was as much as a 50° shift from last week to this in one day. Is this an aspect of climate change, or just a strange time in the history of our weather? We’re not supposed to realize climate change marked in the passage of a few days or even years, but I can’t help but notice things with a new perspective.

Anyway, I’m still not sitting around the house watching the weather channel, though it may sound like it at the moment. Regardless of the ridiculous weather, we have taken opportunities to enjoy the arrival of winter, officially. We spent most of the day at Stone Mountain yesterday in the Christmas Village. Despite the cold wind, a bundled family – and several hundred others – managed to persevere and blow a wad of money enjoying the spirit of the holiday. We took in the lights, sounds, and smells of sweets, a parade, and cheesy stage shows.

This week’s “The Pain” comic tells the story – probably from my area of the world – of Obama’s election. When I first perused it, I had assumed Mr. Kreider was not a fan of Obama. For this one, you need to read the Artist’s statement which raises the comic wit.

…watching Obama’s luminous acceptance speech, hearing him say to all those who had bitterly fought his election what I could never have imagined Bush saying to me and my friends—“I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too”…Yes, I thought, magnanimous in victory: donuts for all. Seeing our first black president, that science-fiction trope for The Future, become a reality, I felt the way people must have felt the night men first walked on the moon.

“The Pain–When Will It End?” is a satirist web-column generally focused on political fodder and social follies. The artist, Tim Kreider, is well-known in his industry and a seasoned veteran of political cartoons. Seasoned with paprika and cumin, presumably; based upon his caustic wit. I’m a fan of the spices. I don’t always get the joke, but then I don’t put a lot of time into politics either.

Remarkably, the biggest change at the Gradin household is simply in our perception. There are all sorts of things that change when a new child is born into your family. Your free time dries up, your bank account empties, you become more selfless. But when you already have an older child, the thing we noticed was that the older child stopped being a baby in our eyes. I never realized how big he was – how big his hands were. It’s harder to carry him sleeping into his bed at night. This new addition, so small and defenseless, makes us realize in ways you can’t truly convey to anyone that she’s the only baby in the house. Perhaps Balthazar became “our first child.” Even though he’s only five years old, I sense that he’s more in charge of his destiny and in self discovery now. Sorscha, on the other hand, seems to have so much more malleable potential tied up in her.

I’m doing my best to ensure that I don’t lose sight of the treasures still to come in our first-born while our attention is diverted to this little girl. It can be a struggle keeping up with everything at home while still making time for me and Balthazar to play the games we used to play. Easing that, he’s recently really gotten into board games. I can keep an eye (and ear) on Sorscha while we play board games without being too distracted to give him my attention. It’s also easier to allocate this time, as our outside time has been cut short for the coming winter.

This experience of having our second child – some 5 years apart from our first – has given us new wisdom that I feel one can only gain through life.

One cannot fully appreciate what happens to the being at the birth of your first child. You undergo a transformation unlike anything before or after that moment. I remember seeing a baby born vaginally when I was an adolescent, and the experience gave me some spine-tingling chills that hinted at this fact. When we had our first child, the internal shift from my awareness of self: man, husband, child, protector, supplier, etc., went spiraling around and may have momentarily just been forgotten. It didn’t matter anymore. The thing I remember most – and perhaps something that sums up a great deal of this feeling – is that I lost my sense of invulnerability. Perhaps it’s passed on to the next generation – much to a parent’s chagrin.

Now at the birth of our second child, we see the real development of our first. Less of the initial surge of fatherhood that fills you, though a new awareness of everything that can’t be ignored.

I really mean to say that there are some lessons in life that we’re taught, but can never be appreciated until experienced. You were told that you’d one day look back at your school days and realize you were having the time of your life. You’re told that a child will change you. I’ve heard that time flies as you get older. “One day you’ll understand…” All of these things go unheeded as our elders press them into our heads. Being at the crossroads of naivety and understanding, I want to impart a sort of enlightenment to those behind me on the path. But who am I kidding? I’m just saying the same thing…

I have heard this one before. It was once said that bumblebees were scientifically incapable of flight. Today’s future-potential piece of mythical folklore is that the pterodactyl was also incapable of flight. Katsufumi Sato has collected and assessed the data only to reveal nature’s secret to flight: “…the largest animal capable of soaring across the sky unaided could have weighed no more than 40kg (88lbs)…” Pardon my layman intellect in the matter, but that statement seems a bit…constraining. My meager interest in science has taught me, if nothing else, that nature cares little for restrictions. Say that natural flight is limited to an object under 100lbs. and the next thing you know, a flying hippopotamus sores over your freshly washed car. I just mean to demonstrate that nature is not seemingly bound by our attempt to mathematically explain it all. Or perhaps we are unaware of the math necessary to explain it. Besides, the pterodactyl did potentially exist for 186 million years – surely it evolved great wings for a reason and got some fly time in there. I also found great exception to this comment:

Prof Sato says animals heavier than 40kg would not be able to flap fast enough to stay aloft. This would explain why the wandering albatross weighs only 22 kg (46lbs).

I don’t think that Sato’s 40kg hypothesis is the reason the albatross weighs 22kg. I doubt Sato was consulted on the matter of albatross evolution when it came to weight considerations.

It’s just a wild scientific hypothesis, but it irritates me for some reason. Perhaps because the pterodactyl has always been somewhat of a hero to me – it’s the biggest creature ever to have ruled the skies and the idea of it amazes and frightens me simultaneously. Don’t go messing with my heroes, it’s just not cool!

Lennart Green, the foremost close-up card magician of the world, dazzled the audience of TED 2005. I caught the video today on my Zune and was thrilled. His show is very entertaining, quick witted, and his foreignness is close to my heart (Green is from Gothenburg, Sweden). The TED video is around 30 minutes of goodness. Green had me laughing often, and his hand work is second to none. If you ever wanted to be a magician, watch this video and give up on your dreams. You’ll never amount to anything!

Carlos brought to my attention his recent exploration of road rash. Oh, Carlos, where can I learn more? Personal experience is often a better teacher than anything else.

Today I took my first big spill on my bicycle. I was very close to work, as it often happens, so I finished up the ride with blood running down my leg. When I got to work and hit the shower, I learned the extent of the damage. In describing this for my right leg, it’s probably easier to talk about the parts that remained undamaged. They’re without noticeable tan, hairy, but otherwise beautiful. Maybe a few lumps and scars from previous accidents. Oh, and rare hamburger meat comes to mind when looking elsewhere.

It’s entirely my fault. I was shooting across a green light with traffic to avoid stopping and losing my pace. The roads are wet from all the rain, so when traffic stopped just after the light, I was unable to follow suit. I touched the front brake to slow me down, but the front tire instantly locked up. Too much pressure, apparently. With that, it was a matter of 1 second before all hope of regaining composure was lost. I flattened out on the road with my bike and slid for an eternity before finally stopping myself with my face…on the curb. The curb is okay and only suffered minor indignities. I actually had time to think about how bad the road rash was going to be while I slid. I was toying with the idea that it may not be so bad because of the wet roads – a true fact, actually. Funny thing about these things is that you don’t really feel the pain until after you stop. I felt heat on my leg from the friction, but that was it. And like a 10-year-old, I jumped up out of the street and yanked my bike up onto the sidewalk as if to pretend nothing happened. I was asked if I was okay and needed a ride, but the adrenaline and shock had me thinking I’d be fine, if only a little scuffed up. I am okay, truly. The rash on my leg hurts pretty bad, but it’s tolerable.

I was able to get it cleaned up pretty well in the shower at work, though I will need to do some scouring at home. The worst part at the moment is that I’m wearing jeans that are slowly getting damp with, presumably, lymph fluid. My buddy, Brandon, is picking up the medical supplies to keep me from sticking to the jeans. I have some additional precautions to take while riding in the rain, but I didn’t really learn how to avoid the lock-up problem. Brandon says disc brakes are better for “modulating” to avoid the lock-up. Calipers tend to give you all or nothing, which is certainly what it felt like today. On a positive note, I’ve now ridden nearly 350 miles commuting.

Yesterday was Balthazar’s first day of school. It started early that morning and the whole family was up for the affair. We drove him in and walked him to his class. It’s one of those “big steps” in a child’s life. I am excited about the idea of him becoming independent and beginning his formal education. He’s growing up and I look forward to all the things we’ll do together in the years to come. Amy, on the other hand, has a distinctly different take on her little baby’s first steps in the big world. Her experience was miserable as a child, and didn’t apparently get much better in later years. She hated school, and she doesn’t want Balthazar to have a hard time either. Balthazar began his journey into the world with a brave heart. I was proud of him for being so courageous in the face of the unknown – I had very few worries.

After school, Balthazar was to take a bus over to his after-school care with some friends – apparently more like 20. We knew it was a lot to manage in one day, so we agreed to pick him up early from there. He barely managed to get out some vague details about his day before he passed out completely in his car seat. The guy was worn flat-out by his adventures. It turns out his day was a mixture of fear and fun. We weren’t able to convey the amount of time he’d spend at school, though technically it was less than what he spent in pre-K and after-school before. He got scared and cried a little bit early in the day. After some lunch and recess time, it sounded like he came to better terms with it.

As parents, we hate to know that our child was upset and afraid. You’re completely helpless when they’re away and having these feelings. I guess that’s what it is that parents really get upset over when their child gains some independence. You really feel the need to continue helping them and holding their hands when obstacles arrive, but you just have to let them make a go at it themselves. You do everything you can to ensure that they’re going to do good in the world and that they’ll have every manner of protection at their disposal, then you send them out the door to see how you did. It surprised me a lot that he had an emotional break-down at school. Not that that’s unordinary by any means, I just thought that he would have such a great time.

Today is Friday and he’s off on his second day at school. As a testament to his courage, he said yesterday that he wanted to go again. Even though there were some rough spots to contend with, Balthazar has stood back up to give it another try. I believe that he’ll have done much better this time, and he may even begin doing the things that we all loved at school; making friends.